


adjournment

by en passant (corinthian)



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-10
Updated: 2014-12-10
Packaged: 2018-02-28 21:01:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2746940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corinthian/pseuds/en%20passant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Moments and dreams in Kaiba's life. A little bit of metaphorical Prideshipping and <i>perhaps</i> a mention of Kisara. Or perhaps not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	adjournment

**Author's Note:**

> Some board games, such as chess or Go, use an adjournment mechanism to suspend the game in progress so it can be continued at another time, typically the following day. The rationale is that games often extend in duration beyond what is reasonable for a single session of play. As in chess, there is sometimes a sealed move, where the next move that would be made is sealed in an envelope, to be played out (usually by an independent third party, normally the director or arbiter). [[wiki](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjournment_%28games%29)]

1.

He is eight and the chocolate he has stolen from his mother’s purse is sinfully delicious. It’s summer so of course the sweet has squeezed out from between its foil dress and stained not only his fingers but his shirt collar and the corner of his lips.

He tries to wash his hands, before she sees him, but all too suddenly she catches his wrists and pulls him towards herself. His smaller body fits against hers like they were made to go together (and he thinks, briefly and unfavorably about his father). She doesn’t scold him, just laughs a little and says, my little boy, what have you done to your face? She wipes the chocolate clean with a towelette that smells like lemons and disinfectant. 

Later, he looks in her purse again to see if there is another chocolate. There isn’t and he is disappointed that there won’t be a repeat of her hands on his face.

(This all, of course, is an event he remembers far later. And, with almost a decade of distance between him and her the desire has become so keen it cuts like a knife. The idolization is second nature, however, and he pays it no heed.)

2\. 

At ten, sometimes the man will call him to his bedroom. _Seto_ he’ll grate out from his comfortable throne of pillows and ornate bed. _Seto, tell me how your studies have progressed._ He recognizes it for what it is, of course, a powerplay. The old man thinks he can make him uncomfortable and also intimize it, thinks that he can make Seto long to _be_ him.

He sneers, of course, refuses to think that the expression is a repeat of Gozaburo’s and instead claims it as his own, aggressively. He’ll report without missing a beat, he’ll _be perfect_ because that’s the game and Seto has always been good at games.

3\. 

He’s thirteen when Gozaburo first hires her to have sex with him. He locks them in a room and leaves and Seto thinks that’s his first mistake. Gozaburo isn’t paying the woman enough so Seto offers her a hundred more to do nothing.

Her name is Sara and she agrees. He doesn’t dislike her, she’s foreign and has pale ice-blonde hair and eyes. There’s something pleasantly uniform about here, no hidden angles or difficult planes for him to look at.

It is, he thinks, a small step in their game. Gozaburo has only meant to made him uncomfortable, after all, he didn’t even stay to listen at the door.

4\. 

And, a few months later, the larger game shows itself.

It’s a gift from Gozaburo, a clip of a nation that Seto doesn’t know the name of (but he promises himself to find out, and later he does and even later he visits) under destruction. “Lovely, isn’t it?” Gozaburo asks.

He knows the tanks, the bombs, the brilliant flashes and shockwaves. He recognizes the shrapnel, the debris. Everything works as it should. He resists the urge to vomit because his training has given him that much control, at least. But he can’t control his face.

Gozaburo laughs at him.

5\. 

He is fourteen and Sara is invited back.

Again, Gozaburo doesn’t listen at the door but he says, “Even you have to get naked to have sex, Seto.” A jeer. The same jeer as the one from the other day, mocking the prim way he gestured during a presentation. A real man moves like he’s killing. Seto can only think of how people look when they’ve been bombed and it makes him ill.

So he pays her double to take off her clothes and he removes his pants and underwear. Then they play poker.

When they’re done though, she pulls him close and whispers into his hair, “I haven’t done enough for you, this time.”

6.

Fourteen and seven months. Timelines are accelerating. He hasn’t seen Mokuba in months, it feels like, but he sees Sara again. He doesn’t know why she’s there — not when he has so many other things to do. The stocks and shares are in a precarious balance and she doesn’t say she’s been paid. She wouldn’t have been paid, Gozaburo was playing _against_ Seto now, more fully. Or maybe she was and this is another move in the game.

She tries to gather him to her, again. It’s affectionate and reminds him, vaguely, of his mother. “Leave, or I’ll have you removed.” He tells her.

“You’re falling too quickly,” she says. “The dark will take you.”

And he becomes angry. She doesn’t know what he’s doing. She talks like she can see where he’s hidden his pawn that will become a queen, on the far side of the board. So he says, “Take her away, I don’t care how you get rid of her.”

(Later, he will wonder, if she was killed and it is his fault.)

7.

He’s fifteen and he rules the world.

His hands shake as if he pushed Gozaburo himself. (He might have, one day, he would have liked to, maybe.) (Maybe his hands shake because he was robbed of the chance.) Kaiba Corp is nothing before him but a collection of items. Money. Power. Prestige. He can change them. He’ll shut all of the weapons away into drawers, hide them away and show Gozaburo that he’s done more than become his father — he’s surpassed him.

Seto doesn’t notice, doesn’t care to notice, the way his fingers smudge the glass window.

8.

There has never been anything so exciting.

Sleep is stolen from him, but that’s par for the course. Something inside of him has shifted, more than it did when he became Gozaburo’s student and more than when he received his final lesson. All he thinks about is death and it puts him on edge but when he wakes up screaming and can taste his own blood in his mouth it’s like a baptism. 

9.

Another game, this one not played with cards.

They each hold a knife to the other’s throat and lean in. The first person to flinch loses. Seto is certain that he won’t lose this game, he refuses to. The other Yuugi has such hungry eyes and neither of them pays much attention to the tiny rivulets of blood that work down their throats.

He only wakes after he has bled out and they have kissed and the other Yuugi’s fingers have crept into his windpipe.

10.

In the darkness there is nothing but shards. Someone has kindly sanded the edges so that they’re smooth, but he thinks if they were sharper they would be easier to put back together.

There is no time, no light, no feeling other than a slow tugging where his heartbeat should be.

11.

“Anything is possible,” he doesn’t believe it, of course, it’s said jeeringly, of course.

But Mokuba grins and pretends like he believes it. And, Seto, who is too newly returned and too recently thought he lost everything soaks up the smile without hesitation. He slides his hand through his brother’s hair — it’s so long, he he always wear it long? Sometimes it seems like the time before Death T and then the time before Gozaburo was so long ago, so fogged and out of reach.

12.

He can’t sleep but he still dreams.

In a back alley of Domino they meet again. The whole city is a sprawling battlefield and this is where they meet again. And, in a move very much unlike themselves, they abandon any game whatsoever.

He peels Yuugi’s school uniform from his body, then he peels off the wide eyed boy that is Mutuou Yuugi. All that is left is that _other_ thing. Sharp and dangerous and someone that Seto thinks, probably, doesn’t feel regret.

He tries to catch it in his hands, feels smooth shoulders and the soft nubs of collarbones. It loosens the ribs in his chest and puts its hands against the inside of his pelvic bone and it _burns_ and he has never felt anything so good before.

13.

For his seventeenth birthday he buries his father at Alcatraz.

14.

“You play more conservatively than I would have guessed,” the king of games says. Seto doesn’t reward him with a shrug or sneer. There’s no need to play into an assumption of personage.

“And you’re more foolish than I would have guessed,” he counters calmly instead. Captures a rook, captures a pawn, lets his bishop march across the board.

“This kind of game suits you? It’s so distanced.”

“Since when is a game of war distanced?”

“It’s only a game of war if your battle is for only two people. War is usually fought with armies and kingdoms.” The other Yuugi just barely avoids check. Seto will have him in eleven moves. He places his queen. “Am I such an impressive enemy?”

“J’adoube.” He re-places his queen.

The other Yuugi is laughing at him.

15.

Such mournful prattling doesn’t suit him and doesn’t suit the other Yuugi. The Pharaoh has departed, the Pharaoh has left, a great friend has gone to the beyond. They keep saying things like that but he only feels two things — anger and betrayal — and both are too familiar to really matter.

He does spare a moment though, to say, “Next time, Yuugi.”

(And, that night, he will dream: his hands will be working, piecing together the shattered, monstrously eternal, body of a Pharaoh, a puzzle that can never be completed; checkmate in seven moves; a kiss with too many teeth to be human and the warm sated feeling of having met and defeated a challenge.)

17.

When he is twenty he takes his brother to the largest toy store in the world. They are both, probably, too old for it but he is making good on a decade’s old promise. Hamleys is not a technological wonder like anything that _he_ produces but there’s an honesty to the craft that he can appreciate.

They go casual — he abandons his suits and trench coats and even if people recognize them he pretends he doesn’t notice their stares. “Pick out anything you want,” he tells Mokuba, thinks about it and then adds, “Then we’ll. . . get hot dogs or something.”

Mokuba seeks out the wood crafted toys, something so opposite of what Kaiba Corp puts out that Seto wonders if it’s loyalty or enjoyment, at first. In the end though, does it really matter?


End file.
